Sermon for Passion Sunday
“By his own blood he entered in once into the holy place,
having obtained eternal redemption for us”
We are like the mother of Zebedee’s children in today’s gospel. We want what is best not always knowing what that is. “Ye know not what ye ask,” Jesus says ever so gently and yet ever so devastatingly. There can be no greater commentary on the nature of human desire than this. What will it take for us to learn? Nothing less, it seems, than our constant attention to the things of the Passion of Christ, to the things that are unfolded before us and which are explained to us, even more, the things with which we are involved, perhaps more intimately than we realize.
This Sunday is called Passion Sunday. It marks the beginning of deep Lent, a more intense focus on the nature of redemption. The word, ‘passion’, signifies our being acted upon. When we think of suffering we think about the hurtful and painful things which happen to us in body and soul. Yet we are active in this, as well. For example, we can worry ourselves sick; worrying is something which we do and rather well. Our acting upon our feelings can have disastrous consequences for us individually and collectively.
When we contemplate the bloody, sorry state of our world, we contemplate not the absence of God but the evil of our own doings. God is not the author of the horrible events that belong to the record of the day-to-day of our contemporary world, from torture to battles, from killings to shootings, from accidents to even the mysterious disappearance of airplanes. Troubling and horrifying events are about what we are capable of doing and what some actually do; they are also about accident and circumstance, the collision of events undertaken for different purposes. Yet, to blame God denies the freedom and responsibility which belongs to human dignity, something God-bestowed. The Passion of Christ allows us to see suffering in another light, namely, as belonging to our redemption, to our being at one with God, all the troubles and the sorrows of the world and our souls notwithstanding.
